


Renovation

by canistakahari



Series: space IKEA [1]
Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Crack, Domestic, Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Nesting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-26
Updated: 2012-09-26
Packaged: 2017-11-15 02:30:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/522169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/canistakahari/pseuds/canistakahari
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim has a whammy put on him by an alien death ray and he suddenly craves domesticity. He's crazy with longing to shop at space!Ikea and get potted bamboo and he starts looking into adopting AND HE HATES HIMSELF AND CANNOT CONTROL THE SHIT. Luckily, McCoy is drunk all the time and plays house.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Renovation

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [space_married](http://space-married.livejournal.com/).

*******

 

The thing about Jim is that he’s an  _idiot_.   
  
Okay, so that’s probably just a  _little_  harsh. McCoy knows better than anyone that he isn’t actually stupid at all; Jim is observant and thoughtful despite how often he pretends he isn’t, but he can also be stunningly dense and oblivious to danger of any kind, to the point where it borders on the utterly masochistic and downright reckless.   
  
It kind of drives McCoy a little nuts (read: a  _lot_  nuts), and he’s spent most of their friendship together collecting numerous and widely varied boxes of hair-dye-for-men from every planet they visit in preparation for the day when Jim’s antics will finally just shock him grey all at once.   
  
And really, everything would’ve been fine if Jim could just keep his fucking mouth shut sometimes. That would be a real goddamned blessing, because it would mean at the end of the day, McCoy isn’t helping two members of security heave Jim’s writhing body onto a biobed. It would mean he’s not snapping at said redshirts to “get the fuck out of my way, dammit, can’t you see I’m  _working_  here?” It would mean he’s not left frantically waving a tricorder over Jim and trying to figure out what the fuck went wrong, what was that thing they shot him with, and why is he raving about  _light fixtures?_  
  
McCoy pushes down on Jim’s shoulders in a rather futile effort to get him to stop wiggling around, and Jim suddenly locks eyes with him and raises both arms, smacking his hands around McCoy’s face.   
  
Jim’s fingers dig into the back of his neck, and McCoy flinches at the desperate force of his grip, his eyes going wide, the tricorder slipping out of his hand and dropping to the floor. It doesn’t really matter anyway, because according to that piece of crap, there’s absolutely nothing physically wrong with Jim.   
  
“Jim?” he asks, bewildered, as Jim yanks his face down until they’re just about nose to nose.   
  
“Bones, help me,” whimpers Jim. His readings are just visible from the scanner lying forlornly on the floor; okay, maybe it doesn’t look like there’s anything wrong with his  _body_ , but his brainwaves are  _off the fucking charts_.  
  
McCoy softens immediately at the pleading tone and then spends a second cursing himself for being so damn easy when it comes to Jim fucking Kirk.   
  
“What, Jim? Tell me what the hell’s wrong, I can’t damn well read your mind!”  
  
Jim’s jaw works methodically, his expression flashing rapidly through apoplectic rage and deep confusion before settling, reluctantly, on mania. “Bones, listen to me. What do you think about red? For the kitchen?”  
  
“…What kitchen?” McCoy replies weakly.   
  
“Our kitchen,” Jim says dreamily. He’s got such a grip on McCoy that when he passes out a second later, McCoy slips abruptly out of his limp hands and they bash foreheads, McCoy yelping as he flails to the floor.   


oOo

  
  
When Jim wakes up, it’s to McCoy sitting in a chair by his bed, feet propped up on the mattress. He’s hunched forward, a squinty scowl on his face, and there’s a puffy bandage stuck to his forehead.  
  
“Red is too bold,” McCoy says, out of nowhere, and raises a scrutinizing eyebrow at Jim. He’s wrapped in a rather superfluous lab coat that Jim has privately decided he likes purely because it has ‘Dr. McCoy’ stitched over the breast pocket, and his expression seems to imply someone deliberately took a piss in his morning coffee and he’s going to get  _revenge_.   
  
Jim doesn’t really know what the fuck he’s talking about, but that doesn’t stop him from sitting up and demanding, “What would you want, then?  _WHITE_? Stop being so old-fashioned, Bones, this isn’t your grandmother’s kitchen! What do you want next,  _LACE CURTAINS_?”  
  
McCoy is just staring at him, wide-eyed, eyebrows raised, stuck between equally strong desires to laugh uproariously or start yelling at Jim until he makes some sense. Eventually, he says, carefully, “Okaaaaay. There’s nothing wrong with you physically, so I’m confining you to quarters until I can figure out what that alien thingy did to your head. Clearly you’ve gone completely fucking bonkers.”  
  
Jim’s face screws up, and he has the distinct appearance of a man desperately trying to say something other than what comes out of his mouth. “I think we need new bath accessories.”  
  
McCoy reverts back to staring blankly. “To replace the ones we’ve  _never had_?” he asks incredulously, eyebrows climbing his forehead like furry mountaineers.   
  
“Nickel,” says Jim firmly. “Nickel is nice. Classic. We need to go shopping hardcore, Bones, there’s a station, like, six light-years from here that does the home décor thing. How do you feel about potted bamboo?”  
  
“Confused,” replies McCoy, flatly.  
  
“I can appreciate that,” Jim agrees genially, with a charitable nod. “Home decorating is a serious business. If the bamboo isn’t your thing, what about onion grass? I kind of like the idea of, you know, ornamental vases.”  
  
“We live in space, Jim,” McCoy says helpfully, in the slow, condescending drawl he uses on the herds of nervous ensigns he has to coax and cajole during the truly special hell of bi-annual physicals. “We don’t even  _have_  windows in our quarters, and thank fuck for that.”   
  
If McCoy actually had to  _see_  space every time he woke up or ate breakfast in the mess or walked down the corridor, he’d never get anything done because he’d be too busy enjoying crippling anxiety attacks in the medical bay supply cupboard. He operates best on staunch denial.  
  
“That’ll make picking curtains tough,” muses Jim, spectacularly undeterred by McCoy’s announcement. “You think they sell, like, window decals? So you can create the  _illusion_  of having windows?”  
  
“I  _think_  I need a drink,” McCoy mumbles in response, tugging the lab coat around himself tighter and sinking down in his seat. His mouth is a flat, pursed line, and his eyebrows run almost parallel; he looks, to Jim, like abject misery personified.  
  
“We can install a bar,” Jim suggests brightly.   
  
“Hell fucking yes,” mutters McCoy.  


oOo

  
  
McCoy sullenly releases Jim to quarters, reprogramming their door override so that Jim can’t wander off and commandeer a shuttle to the nearest starbase on a towel run, and then stomps off angrily to shower. When he emerges, damp and pink and feeling marginally less like he wants to hurl himself into the nearest busy trans-galactic shipping lane, Jim is sitting in the middle of the living area with a stack of PADDs.   
  
He’s tapping furiously, scrolling through something, and McCoy sinks down to sit behind him, aligning his body with Jim’s back and resting his chin on his shoulder, peering down at the PADD in his hand.   
  
After a moment, he rumbles, “Is that a catalogue?”  
  
“Uh huh,” murmurs Jim, using a stylus to type what appears to be a shopping list into another PADD.   
  
McCoy watches him browse for a moment longer, and then asks, “Do we really need a dishwasher? We eat in the mess hall, Jim, like everyone else. Any dishes we use in our quarters go straight down the chute and come out clean on the other end. There’s absolutely no need for private kitchens on this ship.”  
  
“There’s always a need for waffles,” growls Jim, surprisingly vehement.   
  
“Huh,” mutters McCoy, and he points to a shelving unit that Jim’s just scrolled to. “I like that. That could fit in the closet.”  
  
“It would really maximize the space,” agrees Jim.  


oOo

  
  
After two days, it’s clear that Jim’s rabid new domestic tendencies aren’t really going anywhere at all, and McCoy is totally at a loss for how to treat him. He seems perfectly fine, and the scans he runs every couple of hours reveal nothing but elevated hormone levels and spiking brain activity.   
  
If McCoy didn’t know better, he’d say Jim is  _nesting_ , but that’s just fucking bullshit, Jim’s never shown any inclination at all to build a home together, which suits McCoy just fine. The last home he built with someone is still where he left it, on a lovely patch of land in Georgia, but he’s not actually legally allowed to live in it anymore, even if he’s still paying the blasted mortgage.   
  
He ends up reluctantly clearing Jim for duty, because Jim is driving him absolutely  _bugfuck_ ; he either spends his time following McCoy around sickbay and pestering him for his opinions on drapery, or he fills McCoy’s medical PADDs with shopping lists, and, much more disturbingly, information about adoption centers that cater exclusively to Starfleet officers.   
  
He hopes that letting Jim return to active duty will give him something else to do, like, you know,  _his own work_ , and Spock is at least there to watch him and make sure he doesn’t go completely insane and start picking out carpets for the bridge in the middle of a firefight. They’ve got nothing strenuous on the docket right now anyway.  
  
When he exits the turbolift halfway through alpha shift to check on Jim (though McCoy would be hard-pressed to admit that to anyone, and is, in fact, carrying a crew roster with inoculation schedules on it that he’s been brandishing defensively at anyone who so much as glances at him, just in case he’s asked what the fuck he’s doing on the bridge  _again_ ), he stops short, staring.   
  
Jim is seated cross-legged on the captain’s chair, and he’s holding what look like paint swatches.   
  
The damn things are scattered all over the floor surrounding his chair, and he’s got two lined up, held to the light, as he squints at them through a discerning eye.   
  
From where he’s standing, McCoy can’t actually see a colour difference between them; they both appear to be some pansy-ass shade of greeny blue. McCoy wouldn’t dare say anything like that to Jim, though, especially when he seems intent on picking the best possible colour that suits their ‘personalities, character, and moral values as human beings’.   
  
Yesterday, Spock had made the disastrous decision to point out that Jim’s fixation on nickel-plated bathroom fixtures was “illogical,” in a total non-tone that made it sound like Jim had just kicked dog shit into a bowl of Spock’s favourite plomeek soup.   
  
Jim had started, uncontrollably, to cry, a look of stunned horror on his face as if he didn’t understand his own reaction to Spock’s cold, heartless bitchery. Spock had regarded him calmly, while McCoy tried very hard not to relocate his fist into Spock’s carefully blank face, and suggested, “Why not try chrome, Captain?”  
  
“Chekov,” barks Jim, now, and McCoy watches the ensign flinch. “Which of these do you prefer for a bathroom?”  
  
Chekov turns his wheely chair around with all the excitement of a man on death row, reluctantly meeting Jim’s beaming, tortured face. He eyes the paint swatches solemnly, leaning forward a little.   
  
Eventually, he decides, meekly, “The seafoam is wery nice, Keptin.”  
  
Jim relaxes, and tosses the offending swatch into the pile with the other failures. “Good man.”  
  
McCoy sighs. He slips back into the turbolift before anyone notices him, and ends up back down in sickbay, where he skulks around reorganizing supplies until Chapel tells him he’s not on shift for another four hours, doctor, why don’t you go do something else and stop audibly grinding your teeth? The  _you’re driving us all nuts_  tacked on to the end of her sentence is unspoken.  
  
He ends up taking a nap under his desk, and when he wakes later, he’s not entirely sure where he is. He brains himself as he sits up, and when he stops cursing enough to open his eyes, he finds Jim crouching over him, looking excited.   
  
He holds out a PADD and points to a display of sleek, futuristic-looking new furniture. “They’re having a sale! Oh my God, Bones, oak finish is my  _favourite_.”  
  
McCoy briefly considers knocking his head into the underside of his desk again. Instead, he retrieves his emergency bottle of whiskey, tells Chapel he’s unfit for duty and is taking a mental health day, and drags Jim back to their quarters.   
  
What he’d really like to do is press Jim down into the mattress and fuck him until he stops talking about interior design, but Jim is measuring the length of the room again with the measuring tape he’s taken to carrying around on his utility belt, and McCoy sighs, and says, “Let’s go shopping.”  


oOo

  
  
Why the universe needs a starbase that specializes entirely in furnishing the home, McCoy doesn’t know, but Jim is acting like someone started sucking his dick as soon as they beamed aboard, so McCoy is willing to go along with it if Jim is satisfied. He’s always been a soft touch when it comes to Jim, and even though Jim outwardly seems to be enjoying this new domestic goddess phase, McCoy keeps hearing a strain in his tone and noticing a desperate shine to his eyes that suggests Jim can’t help himself and that this is hurting him as much as it’s annoying the rest of the crew.   
  
The first thing they come to is a full mock-bedroom display, and Jim squeals and skips off to examine the duvet cover set draped over the bed.   
  
McCoy trails after him, eyeing the shopping complex with trepidation. There’s some sort of daycare center where you can drop off your kids, and he can see a couple of bored toddlers trawling awkwardly through a pit of brightly-coloured plastic balls. The air conditioning is cranked up to that intolerable arctic cold favoured by all malls and movie theatres, and the faint, disconcerting strains of muzak lazily drift into his unimpressed ears.   
  
Jim is no longer occupying the space he was in just a moment ago, and McCoy’s heart leaps a little, squirming uncomfortably in his chest as he looks around.   
  
“Jim?” he calls, hesitantly. He doesn’t want to be one of those panicked people you inevitably see in shopping malls, traipsing up and down aisles while disinterested cashiers page the lost partner’s name over the intercom. “Jim, where did you go?”  
  
“Bones!” cries Jim, from directly behind him, and McCoy whirls around with a squeaky protestation dying on his lips. There’s a massive piece of framed art in his face, and, oh, there’s Jim, peering at him from around it. “What do you think? It could go by the door.”  
  
“Uh,” says McCoy, pulling his flask from his pocket and taking a slug before answering. The painting is a massive bowl of unidentifiable fruit, and it closely resembles what might occur if cats were enlisted to vomit on canvas in new, exciting, and creative ways. “It’s great, Jim,” he replies.   
  
Oh, God, he kind of wants to die rather than look at it.   
  
“Really, uh, avant-garde.”  
  
Jim isn’t really listening to him, though, just piling things into a cart that’s already somehow a third of the way full.   
  
McCoy blinks at it, nonplussed; when the fuck did Jim get all that? There’s a lamp sitting in the cart, a monstrous thing apparently inspired by a student’s geometry test, spheres and triangles and rhombuses battling violently for supremacy on the lampshade.  
  
Resolutely swallowing another mouthful of whiskey, McCoy prepares himself for a home full of crap that doesn’t match, no matter how hard Jim tries, because while he has an eye for the unique, he seems to have no concept of thematic taste at all. The next item to join the growing clusterfuck is a cushion with a kitten cross-stitched on it.   
  
“A kitten,” he says warily, trying to sound enthusiastic. He actually sounds like his teeth managed to glue themselves together.   
  
“We need a beanbag chair!” declares Jim, leaving McCoy in charge of the cart. When Jim has his back turned, McCoy hurriedly abandons the cushion to a display bed.  
  
They’re only halfway through the bizarrely oriented store, and the cart is already just about full. Jim has added a full service dinnerware set in pale blue, a pair of frosted beer glasses, a whole whack of kitchen gadgets McCoy can’t actually identify, three black furry pillows, a milk creamer in the shape of a cow’s udder, a collapsible shelving unit, three tall bamboo plants, a sprig of plastic onion grass, more of the appalling geometric lamps in smaller sizes, and several things Jim says they need to pick up from the warehouse, which McCoy crankily assumes he will be the one left to build.   
  
They’re rounding the corner into an area populated entirely by display kitchens, when Jim sniffs at the air and declares, “I smell meatballs.”  
  
It’s one of the few things he’s said in the last few days that doesn’t involve home furnishings, so McCoy raises his head and after a second says, “Hey, you’re right. Is…there a restaurant in here, or something?”  
  
Jim is sniffing his way along the path, and suddenly they’re met with a tiny cafeteria, sparsely populated with varying alien races and a spattering of Starfleet officers. Jim has wandered over to read the menu overhead, and when McCoy comes up behind him, he points and says, “Meatballs. They actually have meatballs.”  
  
“Is that salmon?” demands McCoy, bewildered.   
  
“I think so,” replies Jim, equally baffled. “That’s amazing. Look, little quiches. Hey, Bones, let’s eat, I’m starving.”  
  
McCoy isn’t about to argue with that, and Jim has wrapped long, insistent fingers around his wrist, dragging him to the line up, so they spend the next twenty minutes eating surprisingly tasty meatballs, while Jim eyes their cart like an overprotective hawk.   
  
They return to the kitchen section, and that’s where McCoy draws the line. “Jim,” he says firmly, crossing his arms. “We are not buying a range. We have a mess hall, there are kitchens there, they provide food—I don’t even think cooking would be allowed in non-designated rooms, it must be against some sort of regulation! We could burn down the entire deck!”  
  
“But look at it, Bones,” Jim murmurs reverently, running his hand over the smooth surface. “It boils water in 2.3 seconds. And it’s got preprogrammed cook times for a bunch of popular dishes, so it’s like a built-in timer. And it’s shiny,” he croons.   
  
“No,” growls McCoy, shaking his head. “No, Jim, listen to the words coming out of my mouth, don’t just let them wash over you.  _No_. There’s no room for it. There’s no  _use_  for it!”  
  
Jim looks crushed, but he lets McCoy drag him away from the stoves and fridges and industrial-strength dishwashers. By the time they reach the warehouse to pick up the last of their purchases, Jim has forgotten his dream oven.   
  
McCoy eyes the stack of boxes warily, and hands over a credit chit to the expectant cashier. Jim weaves an arm through McCoy’s, leaning his head on his shoulder. McCoy grunts, pointedly not looking at the total on their receipt, and flicks Jim on the back of the head.   
  
“Dammit, Jim.”  
  
“What, Bones?” asks Jim innocently, and his eyelashes brush McCoy’s throat as he blinks.   
  
McCoy grits his teeth, then sighs, weaving his fingers through Jim’s. “Nothing.”  


oOo

  
  
When Jim comes back from beta shift the next day, it’s just past 0100 hours and he’s expecting to find McCoy in bed.  
  
Instead, McCoy is sitting in the middle of the living area, amongst a towering pile of furniture parts and hardware. He’s cross-legged, with a drink between his thighs, and he’s frowning thoughtfully down at a thin acetate page of directions.   
  
“These instructions aren’t in Standard,” he snaps, without even looking up at Jim. The room has the distinct odor of plastic and liquor lingering in the air.  
  
“Apparently I’m supposed to  _vända_  the  _skruven_  with  _this_  useless little piece of shit.” He holds up a tiny piece of hexagonal pipe, the length of his finger. It’s bent at 90 degrees about two-thirds of the way along its length. McCoy holds it gingerly between a thumb and forefinger, eyeing it with suspicion. “Whatever happened to good, old-fashioned screwdrivers?”  
  
“People discovered they were more successful as a drink?” suggests Jim, stepping carefully over packing foam and sliding down to sit with McCoy. He picks up the instructions and presses a button on the touchpad, handing it back to McCoy with a flourish. “Voila, Standard. Insert tab A into slot B, and rock them back and forth into each other until the fit is snug and secure.”  
  
McCoy snatches the instructions back and squints at them, leveling a bleary-eyed glare at Jim. “That ain’t what it says, you overgrown child.” He abandons the multi-purpose tool, immediately losing it in a small mound of bubblewrap, then picks up his drink and drains it in one well-practiced swallow.   
  
“Child,” echoes Jim, speculatively. “Children. Hey, Bones, ever think about kids?”  
  
“Why would I bother doing that, when I’ve already got one of my very own?” drawls McCoy, scowling into his empty glass and looking around for the bottle of brandy he knows must be somewhere in the room, potentially inside one of the many boxes. “His name is Jim, and he’s 26 going on 5. I’m really proud of him, he’s started on chapter books and he can tie his own shoes.”   
  
“Ha ha,” mutters Jim dryly, “I have no clue why you didn’t go into stand-up comedy, Bones, really I don’t. Actually, I do, it’s a funny story, really. You  _suck_.”  
  
“You fucking wish,” retorts McCoy, his eyebrows furrowing. “Does this have anything to do with all that adoption information you keep leaving around for me to find? Because that’s creeping me out, Jim.”  
  
“No,” says Jim quickly, not at all defensive. “That was just light reading. Do you want a boy or a girl?”  
  
“I don’t want anything,” McCoy protests stubbornly. “I don’t want a baby, or a puppy, or a goddamned guinea pig, Jim. We live on a starship. A starship that doesn’t allow children. They prefer you to be unmarried when you join Starfleet!”  
  
“But you can  _get_  married, afterwards,” Jim prods. “I guess that’s the logical next step, right? And then kids come after that?”  
  
“Jim,” sighs McCoy, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I have greatly underestimated the extent to which total intoxication is necessary for my continued acceptance of whatever mind-fuckery that alien ray whammied you with. If you could postpone this conversation until a more suitable time, during which I’ll hopefully be hammered beyond belief, then we can resume marriage and kid negotiations.”  
  
Jim shrugs, and gets to his feet, unperturbed. “Whatever, I’m easy. Besides, we haven’t finished the bathroom yet. I was thinking tomorrow afternoon, we can paint.”  
  
“Green?” asks McCoy, resigned.   
  
“Seafoam,” corrects Jim, disapprovingly. “It’ll be a magical undersea bath-time experience.”  


oOo

  
  
The next morning, McCoy wakes up to the scent of vanilla floating through the room. He mumbles sounds vaguely resembling words into the pillow and turns over onto his back, sniffing appreciatively at the air without opening his eyes.   
  
“Jim?” he calls, confused. He’s almost positive he can smell fresh coffee, too.   
  
“Bones!” replies Jim. “Bones, do you want your pancakes in the shape of a turtle? I’ve almost got the hang of this.”  
  
“Sure,” McCoy finds himself saying, before his brain actually pauses, rewinds what he’s just heard, and feeds it back to his brain at a fraction of the speed. Sufficiently caught up to reality, McCoy snaps, “Wait,  _what_? Pancakes? Jim, I said no to a stove!”   
  
He’s opening his eyes and kicking off the covers in one smooth movement, but it’s still way too early, and he’s never been particularly coordinated in the morning. As an ill-fated consequence, he’s not at all watching his feet in his quest to reach whatever catastrophe Jim is sure to be causing, and all the shit they bought yesterday is still strewn across the floor. A foot away from the bed, he trips on a chair leg and goes down in a heap.   
  
Jim appears above him, holding a tray. “I didn’t buy a stove, Bones. You didn’t say anything damning about a griddle, though.”  
  
McCoy groans, and rolls off a hammer. “Ow, fucking shit, Jim, what’s that you’re wearing?” He pulls himself to his feet and cracks his back, then picks up a squat turtle pancake from the tray Jim is holding. There’s a tiny vase with a single rose in it, standing next to the plate.   
  
“An apron, Bones,” replies Jim, as if McCoy is especially thick-skulled today but Jim is willing to hold his hand and keep him out of traffic. It is, indeed, an apron. It has the dubious pleasure of being pale pink in colour and sporting the words KITCHEN BITCH across the chest in rhinestones.   
  
McCoy’s eyes track across the sparkling letters, and he chokes on the turtle’s head. “Please tell me I’m hallucinating, Jim. Who the fuck let you loose with a bedazzler?”  
  
Jim ignores him, and demands, “How are the pancakes?”  
  
“Thankfully, they don’t taste like turtles,” McCoy retorts, but he finishes the pancake anyway, and heads on into the kitchenette. It’s not quite as bad as he had guessed it might be, but Jim has still managed to get pancake batter on most of the available surfaces and even some of the unavailable ones; when something wet drips down into his hair, he looks up warily and finds several failed attempts at flipping stuck to the ceiling.   
  
“Where’s the coffee?” he asks, shuffling around and half-heartedly wiping at things with a cloth. “I am 85% certain I detected the scent of coffee when I woke up.”  
  
“Right here, Spock,” drawls Jim, with an audible eye-roll. He gestures to their brand new programmable coffee machine, a hideous construct of gleaming silver the approximate size of a Labrador.   
  
McCoy grunts and moves towards it, drawn by the inexorable gravitational force of caffeine. He retrieves a bottle of brandy from their liquor cabinet, pouring a generous shot into a mug before topping it up with thick black coffee. He takes a sip, closes his eyes, and steels himself.   
  
Then, he opens them again, the mug held between him and the rest of the world like a barrier.   
  
“Now,” he says, allowing himself to acknowledge the second part of Jim’s current unfortunate clothing situation. “Let’s talk about why the fuck you’re not wearing any pants.”  
  
“Sometimes I just choose not to subscribe to traditional clothing standards,” Jim shrugs. He’s chewing the legs off a pancake turtle, and the rose from the tray is now stuck jauntily behind his ear. “Pants are overrated, Bones, especially when I’m attempting to present you with a sexy breakfast in bed, and you’re totally blind to my advances.” He sounds hurt, which almost makes McCoy falter.   
  
He takes another fortifying sip of coffee, and sticks to his guns. “Do you know,” he begins, working himself up to the appropriate levels of rage required for the horror he’s currently feeling, “Just how _unhygienic_  it is to cook in a kitchen without any clothes on?”  
  
“I’m wearing an apron!” protests Jim, eyebrows skyrocketing innocently. “The important bits are covered!”  
  
“Your ass is hanging out!” cries McCoy. “You made pancakes without any pants on! You could’ve – God, let’s not even consider how incredibly uncomfortable it makes me to think about all the germs involved in this. How about the fact that you were half-naked while working, rather ineptly, with hot batter? How does a scalding burn on your ass sound to you, Jim? Because it sure as hell sounds like something I wouldn’t treat just out of spite, if you came to me with it!”  
  
“Well, when you put it that way,” Jim admits grudgingly, with a sullen shrug. “But we haven’t had sex for like two weeks, and I can’t get myself to stop this—this—”  
  
“Domestic breakdown?” McCoy interrupts. “I know, Jim, and I’m sorry I haven’t figured it out, but all I’m asking is for you put some sort of covering over your lower half, like, say, I’ll even accept just underwear at this stage in the game. Hell, a towel would do. I just keep thinking about how you’ve made food, but at the same time, you had your junk hanging out. It drastically limits any desire I might’ve had to enjoy your pancakes.”  
  
“Apron!” growls Jim, and because he’s a  _child_ , he very abruptly flings a pancake at McCoy. It slaps him right smack in the middle of the face, gluing itself snugly over his mouth and nose.   
  
McCoy sucks in a startled breath, fails dramatically at inhaling anything remotely resembling air, and snorts as he peels off the offending substance. “Jim!” he shouts, brandishing the mutilated turtle at him. “Pants! All I ask for is pants!”  
  
“You didn’t even say if they were good!” snarls Jim, his nostrils flaring. His eyes are bright blue and glinting with sharp, brittle rage, but he’d be a lot more intimidating if his apron didn’t keep catching the light and glittering like bright happy rainbows. “Sometimes I just want to punch you right in the face, Bones, seriously –”  
  
“Shut up,” snaps McCoy hastily, holding up a hand.   
  
“Wha—”  
  
“Do you smell smoke?” asks McCoy worriedly, his forehead wrinkling.   
  
Jim just stares at him, and, very slowly, starts to turn towards the griddle, which he really honestly swear-to-God thought he’d shut off, but before he can make it, the tiny kitchen erupts in a huge cloud of anti-inflammatory foam, and it becomes increasingly hard to see anything at all.   
  
There’s cold, chilly silence, for a moment, and then McCoy lifts his hand off the top of his mug of coffee, takes a sip of the unsullied liquid he managed to protect, and mutters, “God _dammit_ , Jim.”  


oOo

  
  
McCoy breaks out a little bit, from all that damn foam, which isn’t really endearing him to Jim’s homicidal decorating tendencies, but Jim is getting more and more on edge by the day. Hives are easy to deal with, but a hormonal, short-tempered partner with a completely unfamiliar problem can’t be soothed with some antibiotic cream and a hypospray.   
  
McCoy knows, because he’s probably tried  _all the hyposprays in the known universe_  on Jim, much to his repeated complaints, but he still talks about curtains 90% of the day, while the other 10% is spent pondering if they have enough cutlery for a dinner party.   
  
He’s close to just giving in entirely, operating under the desperate hope that, once they finish redecorating their quarters, Jim will revert back to normal.   
  
McCoy really, really wants this to be the case, because the amount of baby-related literature in their quarters has recently multiplied by about fifty percent. McCoy has nothing against babies, except that they’re loud, screechy, and helpless, but he wasn’t actually kidding when he told Jim it’s hard enough taking care of just  _him_. He spends his waking hours struggling to keep Jim alive; he doesn’t think he could manage the strain of  _two_  life-forms relying on him yet.   
  
Everything finally comes to a head, though, and the mess that spews out is almost a relief.   


oOo

  
  
The whole crew is on shore-leave for a week. This is purely because of Spock, who is occasionally a pretty happening dude.   
  
While Jim in the height of his scary batshit nesting syndrome meant he’d rather be decorating than doing work or eating or  _breathing_ , he also remained adamant to stay in command. It hadn’t been an absolutely stellar three weeks since this shit started, but Jim hated being out of action, and concentrated hard on staying In Control of his Debbie Travis urges. It just meant that when his shift was over, and he returned to their quarters, his enthusiasm for table linens grew on an exponential basis.   
  
However, Spock seemed to realize that shore-leave was a good idea, all things considered, and they were currently docked above Earth. Most of the crew had filtered out already, leaving the ship blessedly quiet, and Jim suggested they take advantage of the time and finish redoing their quarters.   
  
McCoy had spent the previous day building the bar Jim had promised him, and then had immediately christened it.   
  
He doesn’t remember much after that, but there are vague images in his head of playing strip poker, and underwear on Jim’s head, then singing with Jim into a hairbrush, and something to do with plastic cups and a ping pong ball, which means the memories rapidly deteriorate from there.   
  
He  _does_  recall being surprised that Jim had even joined in.  
  
McCoy wakes up on the floor of the bathroom on the second day of shore leave, where he apparently passed out because the tile felt cool on his face.   
  
When he manages to peel himself off the floor, head throbbing like a chorus of bullfrogs, he wets his face in the sink, ignores the massive blotches under his eyes and the fact that his hair seems to be stuck permanently on end, and shuffles out into the bedroom.   
  
The lights are on full, which,  _ugh_ , lance straight through to his brain, stabbing angrily at his senses with the religious fervor of thousands of worshippers wielding pikes and pitchforks.   
  
It takes him a minute to understand what he’s seeing.   
  
The images are entering his brain, despite the screaming protests of his eyes, but somewhere in there the neurons are looking at each other and going, “sorry, dude, it makes  _no fucking sense_  to me either.”  
  
He blinks, rubs his eyes, and then narrows his gaze, hoping to eliminate the halo effect blurring his vision.   
  
Unfortunately, no matter what he does, he’s still left looking at Jim, underwear on his head but otherwise lacking clothes of any kind, standing on the new synthetic oak table McCoy put together the other day. He’s stretched up to reach the ceiling with a measuring tape in his hands, and there’s a stylus in his mouth and a PADD at his feet. The expression on his face is one of pained dismay, and even through the haze of hangover, McCoy can see the panic and loathing in Jim’s eyes.  
  
“I can’t reach,” Jim says, suddenly, without needing to look down to see that McCoy is there. “The fucking table—I’m trying to measure the ceiling, and—and I can’t reach.” His breath hitches, and he emits a great, sucking gurgle of a sob. His hands are shaking, minute little tremors, and his voice sounds like he’s been gargling handfuls of gravel and brambles.  
  
McCoy steps forward, his heart in his throat, all traces of his own discomfort vanishing. “Darlin’,” he says, softly, and good  _God_ , he’s just as hoarse. What have they been  _drinking_? Paint thinner?! “Jim, Jesus, get down, knowing you, you’ll break your fucking neck.”  
  
“I can’t stop,” says Jim, slowly and clearly, frowning hard even as he lowers his arms. “It’s been weeks, Bones, and I feel like  _the entire world will end_  if I don’t install a ceiling fan right this second. I  _itch_. I walked in on Spock and Uhura by accident two days ago, and you know what I said? The proper response would’ve been something like, ‘oh my God I’m sorry, Jesus Christ, please allow me to commit ritual suicide,’ but you know what came out of my mouth? ‘Hey, that’s a really nice armoire you’re fucking against, where did you get it?’.”  
  
McCoy gags a little, and he raises his hands helplessly up to his face like he maybe wants to reach inside his own brain and viciously shake out the images Jim has just put inside it.   
  
“What?” he demands, closing his eyes. They spring open again when he realizes it’s worse that way, now he can see it painted across his goddamned  _eyelids_ , and he repeats, “ _What_? Oh my God, Jim, oh— _God_ , you know what? It’s okay. Get down from there. You’re doing it wrong.”  
  
Jim hesitates, looking down at McCoy doubtfully. “Bones?”  
  
McCoy glares up at him, and says, again, “Get down from there. Don’t tell me you’re losing basic powers of comprehension, now, Jim. And put your underwear on the  _right_  part of your anatomy, dammit. What did we say about nudity?”  
  
“Only in the bedroom,” Jim recites obediently, and thank fuck, he’s sliding off the table and guiltily removing the boxer shorts from the top of his head. “But seriously, Bones, the bed isn’t even separated by a proper wall.”  
  
McCoy doesn’t dignify him with a response. He’s too busy climbing unsteadily onto the table with Jim’s measuring tape and a cross-beam laser level in hand.  
  
"We didn't even buy a ceiling fan," he's grumbling, mostly to himself, as he projects the laser onto the ceiling and sets it down between his feet. If he rises up on his toes, he can press the measuring tape to the ceiling along the red light and call out the measurements to Jim, who dutifully scribbles them into the PADD. Fifteen minutes later, he scrambles down and stands in front of Jim, arms crossed. Jim is beaming at him, PADD held to his chest like a precious little kitten.  
  
"Thanks, Bones," he grins. "I guess the nudity rule doesn't apply to you, huh?"  
  
"What?" snaps McCoy. "What are you talking about? Of course it does."   
  
He chooses that moment to look down at himself and realize Jim's right, damn him, because he's not even wearing his skivvies. He's not sure where they are, since he's almost  _positive_  they're not on his head - he doesn't remember seeing them when he looked in the mirror earlier – but for all he knows, he could still be drunk and passed out and dreaming convincingly.  
  
"Forget it," purrs Jim. He sets the PADD aside, and his tone is one McCoy hasn’t heard for weeks. He’d swear that’s Jim’s  _you better be ready for sex_  face, and it normally means that they’re about to engage in illicit acts whether they’re in bed or on the turbolift.   
  
McCoy abruptly pinches himself, hoping this isn’t a dream. He’s suddenly so hard he can’t  _breathe_.  
  
“What do you say we break in the new table?” asks Jim, leaning against it casually, hip cocked.   
  
McCoy can’t help licking his lips, because Jim does things like this to him, makes him so stupid in love and lust that his brain sputters in panicky circles and becomes totally dysfunctional. If he tries to say anything at all right now, it will probably consist entirely of unintelligible, anxious little noises and no actual words at all.   
  
So all he does is grunt, fixing Jim with a stare he hopes conveys his pressing desire to fuck Jim so hard that he forgets, maybe just briefly, that they haven’t finished the bathroom yet.   
  
Jim lifts himself on to the polished oak surface, hands braced on the edge, leaning forward. He’s smirking, now, and it’s the sort of cocky, obnoxious grin McCoy loves to eliminate with a well-placed lick or suck or rough hand, and,  _fuck_ , he’s spread his legs, thighs taut as he dangles his legs over the edge.   
  
“You,” McCoy manages to garble out, pointing sharply at Jim. “ _Stay_.”  
  
He stumbles over the sad, desiccated remains of boxes and packing materials to the night table by their bed. The bed happens to be  _in_  his way, and since the only thing in his head right now is a scrolling marquee flashing ‘I WANT TO BE INSIDE JIM KIRK’ in massive letters, instead of going around the bed, he throws himself  _over_  it, and when he lands heavily on the floor in front of the table, half the covers and all the pillows come avalanching down with him.   
  
With practiced medical expertise, he separates the plain, unscented, non-flavoured,  _normal_  condoms from the mess of candy-store depravity that Jim favours, palms a handful (which is more than they’ll need but you never know, fingers crossed) and then snatches up the water-based lubricant he insists on.   
  
(“Strawberry, Bones! Ooh, hang on, this stuff warms on contact.”  
  
“That’s disgusting, Jim, not to mention completely unnecessary. In fact, it sounds downright uncomfortable.”  
  
“It sounds  _awesome_.”)  
  
McCoy is back between Jim’s legs in seconds and Jim is laughing, his attention wholly on McCoy, which is something he’ll never ever get tired of. He’s missed it, fuck, he’s missed it  _so much_ , since this started, so when Jim balances his hands on McCoy’s shoulders and wraps his legs around his waist, saying, “Ten-point-three seconds, Bones, that’s totally gotta be a new record,” McCoy chuckles in return, smile spreading across his face like an intrepid explorer mapping undiscovered territory.   
  
“This isn’t a race,” McCoy breathes, pulling Jim right to the very edge of the table and tipping him back. He chases after him for a kiss, and they forget about what they’re doing, for a moment, while Jim worries at McCoy’s lower lip, tugging on it with his teeth until he hisses and parts his mouth, letting Jim shove his tongue in. McCoy draws Jim in enthusiastically, sliding wet and slick and deep, their teeth clicking together in their haste to make the fuck out already.   
  
“Bones,” moans Jim, and fuck but if hearing that word out of Jim’s mouth isn’t his favourite sound in the whole goddamned universe.   
  
McCoy tips Jim’s chin up, tonguing wetly at his throat and Adam’s apple, only pulling away reluctantly to scrabble for the condoms he just dumped on the table.   
  
It’s Jim who ends up doing it for him, pushing his hands away and snatching up the small packet, tearing it open with his teeth while McCoy grumbles, “I told you to stop doing that, Jim, you could rip the fucking rubber...” Protests casually disregarded, Jim hitches McCoy’s hips towards him and, ignoring the lube, spits on his palm. He rolls the condom on and then strokes McCoy with one long, half-slick, warming pull of his hand, leaving him gasping at the rough friction.   
  
The resultant grin on Jim’s face is self-satisfied and irritatingly smug.   
  
McCoy scowls, breathing raggedly through his nose. The angle is  _all wrong_.   
  
Hands cupping Jim’s ass with a squeeze, he lifts him the rest of the way onto the table. Startled, Jim flails a little as he loses his balance, but McCoy breaks his fall; he guides him backwards, one hand behind his head, the other on his hip.   
  
“Relax,” he growls, and he slides Jim closer, until he’s sprawled on his back, ass just hanging off the edge of the table, his legs still wrapped tight around McCoy’s waist. Jim grins, looking up at McCoy through his eyelashes.  _Coy bastard_.   
  
His expression changes when McCoy pushes two slick, purposeful fingers inside him. Jim’s intake of breath is sharp and high and his hips jerk a little, rocking up as McCoy slowly, methodically works him open. He’s tight, fuck, he’s hot and hard and aching around and against and beneath McCoy.   
  
“Hell, Jim,” McCoy says, twisting his fingers and watching as Jim convulses, muscles tightening around his fingers. “You’d think you were this tight because we haven’t had sex for about seventy-billion years. Oh wait, we  _haven’t_. Suns have gone supernova. Stars have gone out.”  
  
“Well,  _excuse_  me,” Jim gasps, straining for something to grab onto as he writhes on the slick, shiny new surface of the table. He finally grasps the edge, hooking his fingers over it and shoving back onto McCoy’s fingers with a quiet little groan, widening his legs for more of the tight, full burn. “I’ve been a little busy going totally fucking insane. I’m personally amazed I’ve gotten, ah, fuck, right  _there_ , Bones, this far.”  
  
“I’m very proud of you,” drawls McCoy, spreading his fingers inside Jim until the other man’s mouth drops open in slack wonder. “Might even have a gold star for you later, Jim.”  
  
“Mean!” accuses Jim, arching his hips off the table with a soft moan. “Fuck, Bones, just fucking do it,  _please_.”  
  
McCoy’s never been able to resist a pretty bit of pleading from Jim. He stretches him for a moment more, leisurely, just to annoy him, and then slicks himself up with careful hands.   
  
Pushing into Jim for the first time in what feels like a criminally long, cavernous  _eternity_  should be a galaxy-wide event, celebrated with balloons and paper hats and some goddamned fucking chocolate cake, and maybe even those stupid, ear-popping firecrackers that Jim loves so much, because  _oh_ , this is good. This is  _overwhelming_.   
  
His vision has abandoned its post, currently hiding uselessly somewhere in the depths of his skull until further notice, so he’s subject to a mess of brightly-coloured spots as he breathes, ragged and frayed, through his nose.   
  
“Aw, crap,” he rasps, throwing his head back and shutting his eyes, because it’s not like he can see anything anyway. “Jim, you prick, I hate you.”  
  
“So motherfucking romantic, Bones,” pants Jim, a crooked, sex-befuddled grin on his face as he rocks gently back onto McCoy’s cock. “Will it be poetry, next, emailed to my PADD in the middle of a boring shift? ‘Dearest Jim, you goddamn moron, get to sickbay so I can hypospray you violently. Love and kisses, Bones’? Or maybe a dozen crimson roses delivered to the bridge?”  
  
“Shut—your— _mouth_ ,” growls McCoy, leaning over Jim as he punctuates each word with a hard kiss. He drops one hand onto the table by Jim’s head for balance, the other gripping tight enough to bruise on Jim’s hip, and starts thrusting into him in earnest.   
  
Every snap of his hips has Jim groaning out a soft, pleased noise, his skin slick with a ruddy sheen of sweat. Their bodies slip on the surface of the table with vaguely obscene slaps and squeaks, which could be awkward, especially when McCoy’s hand goes out from under him and he bashes his chin on Jim’s collarbone hard enough to see stars, but it’s okay, they’re  _fine_ , honest. Jim just starts laughing and clutches at McCoy, while McCoy snorts into Jim’s chest and moves down to drag his teeth over his nipple.   
  
They just fucking roll with it because they’re awesome like that, and one day McCoy will figure out when the fuck he started sounding like Jim in his own head,  _Jesus fucking Christ_.   
  
It won’t be today, though, when he’s balls-deep in Jim and his skin is sparking from head to toe as he grinds in and out of him, their hips working together in tight, even strokes. Not today, when Jim’s dick is pressed between their bodies like a brand, McCoy knowing instinctively that the other man could come with no help at all; the mere thought of it is hot enough to send McCoy careening perilously close to the edge of his own orgasm.   
  
“I think you broke my collarbone,” grits out Jim, his tone petulant.   
  
His fingers slide up McCoy’s arms, nails digging crescents into his flushed skin. He’s breathing impossibly shallow and quick, pupils dilated, and the curve of his throat and his half-closed eyes are the sexiest thing McCoy has ever seen.   
  
“I think I’ve lost all feeling in my feet,” retorts McCoy, and it’s true, he has; the table it cutting into his thighs every time he rocks into Jim and he’s not really sure whether he actually has ankles anymore.   
  
“Pussy,” gasps Jim.   
  
“Degenerate!” McCoy replies. “Need I remind you who’s got his dick in whom?”  
  
“Oh, Bones, keep talking dirty to me,” drawls Jim in a totally exaggerated moan, before dissolving into helpless giggles, and when they had first started sleeping together years ago, McCoy had been really fucking offended the first time Jim had completely lost it during sex and started  _laughing uproariously_.   
  
It doesn’t bother him anymore, hasn’t bothered him since he came to the realization that Jim is never laughing at  _him_. Jim is just the sort of person that reacts honestly and openly to anything highly sensitized and intensely pleasurable, and he does like sex an awful lot. With the amount of endorphins coursing through him, it isn’t surprising Jim resorts to laughter along with orgasm for release.   
  
“Filthy cock-sucker,” snarls McCoy, but he can’t keep it up, he snorts and lets a chuckle slip out, and Jim drags his head down to kiss the dimple that appears at the corner of his mouth.   
  
McCoy wraps a hand around Jim’s cock when he feels his own orgasm building with a sharp twist of need. The inexorable rush of heat curls in the base of his gut like a coiled spring, tense and hard and aching, and he’s slamming into Jim now, every thrust jerking the table along the floor; he’s fervently relieved that the rooms on either side of their own are empty right now.   
  
“We’re ruining the floor,” protests Jim. The thing is that McCoy knows he can’t help saying it, so he just kisses him, kisses him to shut him up and distract him, and as he’s kissing him he flicks his thumb roughly over the slit of Jim’s cock and absorbs his shudder, pressing him tight to the table as he comes.   
  
Their stomachs are a sticky mess, Jim panting hoarsely, and the ripple and tug of heat over his own cock sends McCoy into climax a few thrusts later.   
  
Jim lets him stay sprawled on top of him for a couple of minutes while they both catch their breath, but eventually his legs sag from around McCoy’s waist, Jim says, slightly muffled, “The edge of the table is biting into my ass, Bones,” and he pats vaguely at McCoy’s back.   
  
McCoy grunts, peeling himself off Jim with a grimace. His legs are wobbly, and his feet are a mass of buzzing, angry nerves. He holds out a hand, pulling Jim to sit up straight, and then they look at each other.   
  
“I have to go grout the bathroom,” says Jim, eventually, sounding vaguely apologetic. There’s come streaked across his chest, and his hair is stuck to his forehead.   
  
“I’ll help you,” McCoy replies, biting back the sigh threatening to hiss out of him like a deflating balloon.   
  
“Awesome, I’m gonna go grab pants,” chirps Jim, sliding off the table and padding past McCoy.   
  
“A little late for that, Jim, but I’m glad to see you’re learning,” calls McCoy after him, and even if the smile is hiding from his face, it’s still evident in his voice.  


oOo

  
  
The crazy-ass alien nesting voodoo does, ultimately, wear off.  
  
It takes another couple of weeks, which McCoy has to admit is useful, because they finish the bathroom and the living area, and, after he bans Jim from doing anything at all in the kitchen, McCoy finishes that, too.   
  
Overall, they’ve got pretty bitchin’ new quarters, and although McCoy’s liver is going to need some quality time with the bio-regenerative field machine soon, he’s also got shower curtain hooks in the shape of fish.   
  
McCoy comes off shift one afternoon and finds that all the boxes and plastic packaging and Styrofoam peanuts are gone, and Jim is sitting on their new zebra-print sofa reading a PADD. When McCoy slides down to sit beside him, throwing an arm over Jim’s shoulders so that he can lean in to see what he’s looking at, he’s not quite sure what to make of things for a minute.   
  
It’s not a shopping list, or adoption information, or a mix-your-own-paint(!) company.   
  
It’s not even a  _catalogue._    
  
It’s just a crew roster, and Jim is methodically organizing the next week’s shifts for engineering with a casual, confident hand.   
  
“Hey, you think Crewman Roberts and Ensign DeSylvia are doing it?” Jim asks, pausing to look sidelong at him. He leans into McCoy’s shoulder, tipping his head against it.  
  
“Yeah,” McCoy replies sourly, with a mild frown. “I was the one they both came to for  _advice_. You’d think they were trying to ask each other to prom, it was horrible.”  
  
“Ha,” snorts Jim, softly, and McCoy watches him gleefully schedule them for the same Beta shift.   
  
“They’ll spend the whole shift yowling at each other in a corner like cats in heat,” protests McCoy. “Or worse, flirting incompetently. You shouldn’t indulge them, they’ll find the time on their own, when they’re not on  _duty_.”  
  
“Because the two of them finding time together on shift, that’s  _nothing_  like how you show up on the bridge and stand behind my chair for no fucking reason,” says Jim blithely. “Yeah, never mind, that’s _completely_  different.”  
  
“And you coming down to sickbay for a mild case of the sniffles is an incredibly classy and not at all unprofessional move,” McCoy grunts.   
  
They’re silent for a moment, as Jim taps quietly at his PADD, and then McCoy asks, abruptly, “Burgundy placemats, yes or no?”  
  
“Huh?” mumbles Jim belatedly, about thirty-five seconds after McCoy actually poses his question. “What, Bones?”  
  
“Nothing,” says McCoy quickly, indescribably relieved. He hesitates, wondering if he really needs to be this paranoid, and eventually decides he  _does_. One more test, and he can relax. “Wanna get married?”  
  
“Yes,” replies Jim, immediately, and he cracks a really insufferable, wicked smile when McCoy freezes against him. “Or was that a test, too? It’s not nice to taunt a guy, Bones.”  
  
McCoy cracks his jaw, and swallows. There’s a prickle of sweat at his brow, and his heart is knocking excitedly at his sternum. When, at length, he says, “No, Jim. No, it wasn’t a test,” he’s not lying even a tiny bit, because the next sentence rolls out naturally: “I want to marry you.”  
  
“Cool,” says Jim, sliding down the couch until he can slot his head under McCoy’s chin. “Then that’s still a ‘yes’.”  
  
McCoy doesn’t really know what else to say through the tangle of neediness and insecurity threatening to overwhelm him, so he kisses the top of Jim’s head and puts his palm over the center of his chest, feeling the steady beat of Jim’s heart.   
  
Jim’s hand settles over McCoy’s.


End file.
